Sheriff: Garbage truck driver caught by compactor mechanism

The Mahaska County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that deputies and medics were sent late Tuesday morning to a rural location a few miles east of Oskaloosa to check a report about the man. They discovered that he’d already died. He was identified as 39-year-old Robert Evans, of Oskaloosa.

Sheriff Russ Van Renterghem (REHN’-tur-hehm) said Wednesday that Evans had stopped the truck on the rural road, climbed up the frame to a spot between the cab top and the compactor and then was caught and crushed by the mechanism. An autopsy was ordered.

A spokesman for his employer, Midwest Sanitation & Recycling, didn’t immediately return a call from The Associated Press.